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Interesting that Denver is dual-core rather than quad, though it will still likely deliver much better performance than the current model.

I wish there would be an x86 Atom-based SoC based on K1, but that probably would never happen due to Intel's own investments in graphics. But wouldn't it be grand to have a netbook that could run the "big boy" games and not that Android nonsense? (SteamOS, Windows)

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I would consider the inability of "big boy" games to handle supporting multiple architectures a relegation to the corner with a dunce cap. Yea, there is no market right now for K1 powered systems running classic desktops, but that is because nobody is selling them. They would be mad popular due to the cheapness of ARM chips, a SteamOS powered Shield device instead of Android would dominate the gaming space if developers would ship recompiled games for ARM.

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a SteamOS powered Shield device instead of Android would dominate the gaming space if developers would ship recompiled games for ARM.

Yes, that is the dream. The Shield Tablet, a stunning, potentially "game-changing" (har, har) device, only has about 10 games that really make good use of it. The rest of the catalog is standard Android games, which suffer from being "casual" and made for touch, not console-worthy. The chicken-and-egg market problem may mean that this is where it's going to stop -- it just won't be worth it for game devs to port to OpenGL-over-Android if there are so few customers who would buy the game.

But a Steam Tablet? With a growing catalog of 800 Linux games? That can plug into your TV and use as a decent console and TV entertainment center?

Future, come quick!

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"Denver" is just the name of the core(s), not the whole chip. Nvidia will likely use the same core in successive chips - I'm guessing a quad core next. Then there might be a chip with a Maxwell-based GPU.

Oh, and one reason that Denver is so powerful is because its instruction decoder/scheduler is 7 operations wide, compared to Cortex-A15's 3-wide (and Apple's Cyclone at 6-wide). This is a really powerful core, at least as far as ARM processors go. It will be interesting to see how much electrical power it draws though.